Moving Parts by Magdelena Tulli Page B

of the armchairs Fojchtmajer is smoking a cigarette – the umpteenth in succession. His wife has no idea either how many he has smoked since morning – she makes no effort to count. She’s staring into space from over the other armchair; she has her own frame matching the one opposite, and in it she is smiling at her own thoughts. But no one will believe that she does nothing but smile the whole time. It’s possible to imagine them turning on the bedside light at three in the morning, resigned to the fact that they aren’t going to get back to sleep. In recent days especially they must have been tormented by insomnia: On the nightstands on either side of the bed there are empty phials of sleeping draught. They would make some tea and sit in the armchairs, teacups in hand, discussing the worrying suspicion that they would have to relinquish their polished floors and their phonograph and record collection, and they continually cast doubt on something that was blindingly obvious given the ineluctable way in which the future tense turns into the past. They even tried to joke about this process, but their jokes were not entirely successful; they were not funny enough for them to convince themselves that they were safely beyond the reach of grammar. And so in the end, exhausted by the anticipation of leaving and by visions of an uncertain future, they changed the subject, returning to a certainbetrayal, because betrayal was at least something they were capable of understanding; to certain letters that he had once read though he shouldn’t have; and to lies that she could have spared him. They touched on the affairs of the Polish Word publishing house, which was stagnating below the break-even point, engaged in the hopeless resistance to particular ideas that were advancing victoriously across the entire continent; and the stock-market dealings that for many years now had absorbed all the available energy of his mind and heart, at the cost of love, naturally; and though she had to admit that up till now he had had good fortune, it had brought nothing but money. But was the income he could count on as a publisher sufficient, for example, to pay for her fur coat? Actually, never mind the fur coat – was it enough to pay the workers? In the end they fell silent, having no more to say. The man smoked a cigarette and once again considered the possibility that she may have been betraying him from the very beginning and that she had never stopped doing so; the woman was sobbing, holding a handkerchief to her eyes; and each returned separately to their solitary visions of the future. Perhaps the man was thinking that he would rather put a bullet through his brain than humiliate himself by seeking salvation at any cost. In the woman’s view such a way out would be madness. And so she thought that she didn’t want to know anything ahead of time. Whatever awaits her, she prefers to be taken by surprise by the course of events at the moment when there is no way out; this will spare her theneed for overly difficult decisions. The Fojchtmajers had no wish to exchange well-being for hardship; she would have agreed with him that life is not worth it. What use to them is survival without comforts and entertainment? But at this point in their thinking there must have appeared a crack that was dangerous for the entire structure. Because if there are children, she thought – and he would have agreed with her – the struggle for survival is an obligation that cannot be neglected. Both of them, wife and husband, have to swallow it all, to the end, to the last drop of bitterness, without a glimmer of hope. Arrogance is not permissible here. It’s quite another matter with Fojchtmajer’s father-in-law, grammar-school teacher, lover of the quiet life and of good manners, veteran of the Great War, which the narrator is entitled to call the first, though in this way he also creates a second lying in wait